Zoids Assault. I impulse bought it for $20, and then I realized that it was developed by Atlus (who are even worse at development than they are at localization.) It is probably the worst grid-based turn-based "tactics" game I have had the displeasure of playing- but I wanted to try it because I was very fascinated with Zoids as a kid.

Also Final Fantasy XIII and it's sequel. Proof that buying good reviews, running good customer faith into the ground, and trying to create a template for success is a bad idea. Some people go on about how they play video games "for story"- but I can't help and feel that it's a huge cop-out (especially when the story in said game is such a ball of caca.) The big issue I have with it though is that it tries to replicate elements of past Final Fantasy games, like the characters of Lightning and Snow being almost entirely reskins of Cecil Harvey and Zell Bronx- like Square believes trying to juice particular elements can make an Philosopher's Stone of story telling. Ultimately though, it's bothersome because being a video game adds nothing to the experience. It probably would have been better off and cheaper to produce as another Final Fantasy movie.

I actually enjoy that game, though.

Does nothing to fix the endgame, though, which is where things really get tedious.

I used to play quite a bit of Monopoly several years back, but that was online and on a timer, so it didn't take as long as most live games do. It was quite entertaining.

Monopoly: It is my firm opinion that the world would be better off without this "game".

Munchkin: I'm a fan of cutthroat games. I revel in Stax. I'll play Lunch Money all day. I've got a strong interest in learning Diplomacy. I find the occassional shriek of "Oh, you ASS!" enhances a long night of gaming. I play New Super Mario Bros. Wii with four people. Yet munchkin... is different. All those other games, you can put the cards away and walk away from the table. You laugh and you joke about misfortune being rained upon you by your position, your peers, or your karma. Everybody has fun. Munchkin, though... not for a lack of trying, I have yet to participate in a game of Munchkin that did not end with either a) cards turned into projectiles; b) Someone in tears; or c) a ruined friendship. I don't know WHY it works out that way, I just know it does, and I would recommend everyone give Munchkin a wide berth. If you've played it and everyone's had fun, that's very nice for you but I do think that might be the aberration

Railways Of...: I'll preface this by saying that unlike Munchkin, I do know there are people who honestly enjoy this. But I hope to give a stern warning regarding these games, as from my experience, they have many critical flaws: If "England and Wales" (presented to me as the best of the lot) is anything to go by, they are long (multi hour, though this is not a problem on its own), grindy (the game continues long after a winner should be apparent from board position), and counter-intuitive (the mechanics reward you for building horrifically inefficient rail networks -- the less efficient the better in the long run). I really think the last one is the biggest problem: usually when you try to pathfind or create networks in games, efficency is your buzzword. In "Railways", I noticed that if you did something in four steps that you could have done in five, you were shooting yourself in the foot (even, perhaps ESPECIALLY, in the setup phase)

That's kind of strange. I get people to cry, fit, and blow up at MtG more than Munchkin. I hear lots of horror stories about butthurt in Munchkin, but the people I've played it with never went into it with an attitude of actually being a munchkin (as opposed to when we play Magic.) The game parodies that attitude, and so my experiences with Munchkin were more meta-humor laughing fits than genuine hurt. Do people invite friends to play Munchkin without explaining the joke first?

Don't you think it's somewhat extreme to categorize Ticket to Ride together with 18xx and the Steam series? TTR is effectively just a set collection game, and one of the most prominent gateway games, as opposed to the other mechanical beasts that only has somewhat of a thematic similarity.

I do indeed enjoy ticket to ride.

I didn't, but that's because of how I was introduced to them, via "Railways of England and Wales" (or something like that), which is basically an alternate map of Ticket To Ride and (according to the aficionados) supposedly a lot better due to having a smaller map. I remember very clearly that the introduction began by asking if I liked "train games", to which I had to answer that I didn't know. five hours later, I had a sneaking suspicion the answer might be "no."

Which is part of the reason for my preface: I don't like that style of game (brought to me as "train games"), but I know some people do. It's clearly not for everyone, and having experienced it, I think I can explain why it wasn't for me and might not be for 'you'.


@ Munchkin: That's the weirdest thing -- since one of my friends (whose family had a MASSIVE game cabinet) owned it, the same group of us would occasionally forget just how badly the last round went and a month or more later bust it out. We were all RPG gamers, we knew the joke, and the individual cards are hilarious. Yet, somehow, the game ended at A) or B) every time, even with that core group. We'd avoid it for a while, but eventually time would wear away the pain, or a friend who didn't so commonly come to game night would ask what it was (Failure C sometimes resulting: at least one person who left game night over Munchkin never returned to my knowledge)... My experience may not have been scientifically rigorous, but it WAS more than a single event.

Yeah, I've never had problems with Munchkin.

Hammerwatch - A buddy got this for me so we could have another co-op game to play across Steam, but I gotta say, this is not much of a game. There's progression and all, but you always lose all your progress after you stop playing / die, and it's highly repetitive. The enemies are the worst part since they just repeat over and over and the dungeons are just as repetitive. Unless I'm missing any features, it's simply boring after a few hours. With that said, the gameplay is decent if you have a control pad for the first couple tries and the classes do vary, just not enough for me to want to play this after a while.

~SE++

I'm not entirely sure what game you're actuall talking about, as Railways of England and Wales is an expansion for Railways of the World, not Ticket to Ride. Furthermore, if that is the extent of your experience with train games, why not just state that you didn't like that single game, instead of including the entire genre? Although if it took you 5 hours, I highly doubt it was Ticket to Ride, so I'll err towards the latter, because of the added complexity. BGG has that that listed at 2 hours though.

I've had bad experiences with Battlestar Galactica, but I'm not going to say I don't like sci-fi games or deduction games based on that. (Now, I don't actually like sci-fi, but I love deduction, for what it's worth.) Likewise with Small World and Fantasy/Area Control.

On the topic of munchkin, I dislike it becasue the gameplay is detrimental to the enjoyment of the game, even if some of the cards are amusing jokes the first time you see them.

Pretty much this; like Mister Degradation I've heard horror stories, but nothing like that's ever happened in the Munchkin games I've played.

It's not so much horror stories for me, but my gamegroup just found it unfun after a few plays. Repeatedly beating each other up wasn't very fun for us.

~SE++

I don't really know much about horror stories either. Like SE, I just don't find the game very compelling.

@ Train Game: Five hours was a "what it felt like" estimate, but the time is one thing I do NOT hold against it even if five hours was literally accurate (and it may have been): We had mixed new and experienced players, so I'm sure it would go radically faster with a group that didn't need every step explained. A Magic game can probably take a couple hours if you have to pedantically go through every phase and step of the game and step og taking a particular action, so I wouldn't fault the game for that. As for TTR/Railways, I've told you how I was introduced and did a little lookup regarding Ticket To Ride, which sounded much the same -- sell shares to get starting capital, deliver goods cubes, score points. My main problem with the game I played, which I was lead to believe was a feature of the "train game genre", was that what you would intuitively want to do in order to create a railway network and what you want to do to win are opposites. Efficiency is punished and waste is rewarded, which is basically the opposite of any other scenario where pathing is part of what you have to figure out. Maybe I've just played too many 4x/Empire Building games before encountering the "train genre".

My inclusion of the game comes down to a few basics
1) I did not have fun
2) 1 was not solely due to lack of experience (I lost hard at a lot of other new games that day, but most of them were quite amusing to play)
3) I would be reticent to try it again (Though I would not strictly refuse -- when it comes to games with a human factor, I'll try anything twice)

Are you entirely sure about that? Ticket to Ride has no concept of economy, nor any pick up/delivery aspect. The entire game is drawing colored cards and spending them to put trains on colored rails, to score VP by drawing lines between two points indicated on secret cards. Ticket to Ride is one of the premiere gateway games, on the level of Settlers of Catan.

You're free to dislike the game. All I'm saying is, don't criticize on a large subset of games just because you had a poor experience with one of them.

Alright, did some extra research and it seems that my initial intel linking Ticket to Ride to the game I played was off. It seems to be that while the mechanics I experienced have been repeated a lot, they aren't as universal as I initially believed.

I will defend that I was introduced to the game explicitly as an example of its genre. It was presented to me as standing for "Train games" and I returned that presentation.

Dont get Assassins Creed III on PC. Snother gsme that could be great on PC, but instead is a horrible port from consoles to computer. Like Dark Soul but worse and a ton of lag for no reason.

GunZ 2. I couldn't make it past the character creator. All you get are four different characters that you can't really change, and the female characters have beasts bigger than their heads and have jiggle physics .-.

I felt physically sick after playing The Binding of Isaac for six minutes.